On
the
Ecological Consequences of Alphabetic Literacy: Reflections in the Shadow of
Plato’s PHAEDRUS

by
David Abram

This paper attempts to account
for our current
estrangement from the non-human environment in a way that makes sense —
that is, in a way that takes seriously our direct, sensory experience
of the world, and the transformations that have occurred in that
experience. While some scholars have “located” the source of our human
alienation in the early Judeo-Christian tradition, and others have
located the origins of our estrangement in ancient Greek philosophy,
environmental philosophers have all but ignored the sensory impact of
the powerful technology that was formative for both of these
traditions: the alphabet.This paper will be published in three parts. The first takes
its clue
from Plato’s Phaedrus, summarising work that has previously
been done, by such scholars as Eric Havelock and Walter Ong, on the
cognitive changes effected by the alphabet. The second and third parts
deepen the analysis of certain elements in the Phaedrus in
order to address the impact of alphabetic literacy on the sensory
relation between humans and non-human nature.

The Alphabet and the Idea

Toward the end of that piece of literature we call the Phaedrus,
Plato’s Socrates gives a scathing critique of the technology of
writing. He claims that writing can at best serve as a reminder to a
reader who already knows the things that have been written. Against the
assertion that writing makes humans wiser and improves their memory,
Socrates, quoting the legendary Egyptian king Ammon, replies that
writing in truth destroys memory, for men come to rely upon external
records, instead of exercising their souls to remember. Further, spoken
teachings, once written down, easily find their way into the hands of
those who will misunderstand such teachings while thinking that they
understand. Thus the technology of literacy brings not wisdom but only
“the conceit of wisdom”, making men seem to know much when in fact they
know nothing. Furthermore, we read here that “a written discourse on
any subject is bound to contain much that is fanciful” and in any case
“nothing that has ever been written whether in verse or prose merits
much serious attention.”

Certainly it is strange to hear (even stranger to read) such
strong remarks against writing from a thinker whose numerous written
texts are among the most widely distributed and worshipfully read texts
in the literate world. Here is Plato, from whom virtually all Western
philosophers draw their literary ancestry, asserting that writing,
unless misused, is nothing more than a pastime! What are we to make of
such statements?

A simple way out of the dilemma that this part of the Phaedrus
presents would be to apply Plato’s critique of writing to the very text
where the critique appears, and to those passages alone, maintaining
that here indeed is a piece of writing that should not be taken
seriously. One might hope in this manner to let the disturbing
criticisms of writing turn upon themselves and auto-destruct, thereby
leaving the rest of Plato’s writings unblemished by his derogatory theory
of writing, as inviting as ever to our worshipful gaze.

But it seems Plato intended something more. Surely when he wrote that
in contrast to that which is learned personally in rigorous dialogue,
“nothing that has even been written merits much serious attention”, he
was fully aware that his own voluminous writings would fall under this
caution. It is as though he purposefully meant to build into the very
body of his writings a caution that would keep them from being taken
too seriously. Not, perhaps, because he was uncertain about his own
doctrines or had doubts about the genuine and serious worth of his
philosophy. But simply because he had grave reservations about the
written word and its ability to convey the full meaning of a philosophy
that was as much a praxis as it was a set of verbal formulations. That
he wrote as much as he did makes clear that he was powerfully drawn to
the technique of writing, at which he was a master. Yet the remarks on
writing in the Phaedrus give evidence that despite his devotion
to the craft of writing, or perhaps as a result of it, he was deeply
ambivalent regarding its apparent virtues.

Such doubts about the literacy and such assertions regarding its
debilitating effect must have been legion in Athens around or just
before the time that Plato was writing (as today criticisms of the
computer and its influence on human awareness are rampant at a time
when the new technology is spreading like wildfire throughout the world
— interestingly, one of the strongest criticisms is that the computer
spells an end to literacy!) and it is remarkable that Plato himself
held to these criticisms despite the fact that he was an inveterate
participant in the new technology.

Actually the Greek alphabet had been developed several centuries
earlier, perhaps around 720 - 700 B.C.E. (Havelock, 1963) but it was
only in the latter half of the fifth century and the first half of the
fourth century that the alphabet spread through the Greek culture. That
is, it was only in Plato’s day that the alphabet was incorporated
within Athenian life to the point where we might truthfully speak of
Athens as a “literate” culture; it was only during Plato’s lifetime
that alphabetic literacy became a cultural reality. (Ong, 1982)

The significance of this fact has not been well recognised by scholars
of Plato, or by philosophers in general. It is the assumption of this
paper that despite his cautions (in the Phaedrus) regarding the
hazardous effect of writing upon the search for wisdom, Plato is
already, unbeknownst to himself, deeply under the influence of
alphabetic literacy. In the fifth century B.C.E., it was already
possible to view the effect which such literacy had upon the art of
memory, as what had previously been both a collective and a personal
discipline of the body, accomplished through the countless repetition
of ritual poems, songs, and ceremonies, was transferred to an external
and fixed artifact.

But it was not yet possible to discern the influence of literacy on
other modes of contemplation and thought, which indeed today still seem
to us to progress with an inevitable and unfolding logic of their own,
independent of evolving technologies. Today we simply cannot discern
with any real objectivity the manner in which our thoughts and
conceptualisations are being shifted by electronic technologies, for
the thinking that seeks to discern such a shift is itself subject to
the very effect that it strives to thematise. Nevertheless, we may be
sure that the shapes of our consciousness are shifting in some
fashion attuned to the transformation in these technologies that engage
our senses — much as we can begin to discern, in retrospect, how
Western thought was born of the meeting between the human senses and
the alphabet in ancient Greece.

Earlier in the Phaedrus, for instance, prior to his discussion
of writing and its ill effects, Plato presents, through the character
of Socrates, a finely wrought allegory explaining his notion of
learning as a process of recollection. Many scholars believe that this
doctrine was inspired by earlier Pythagorean doctrines regarding the
eternal and unchanging world of number and numbered proportion that
lies behind the changing world to which the senses give us access, as
well as by Socrates’ association of the individual “psyche” or soul
with the thinking, reasoning self.

Socrates had taken a term that was previously used to name the
invisible life of the body (a sensuous although ineffable power which
was felt to have a mysterious independence of the body — as does the
invisible air that we breathe in and out: the word “psyche” devolves
from the older root “psychein” which meant “to breathe” or “to blow”)
and assimilated it, for the first time, with the verbal, speaking
intelligence (Cornford, 1932 and Guthrie, 1950). That aspect of an
individual which developed and honed its awareness through verbal
dialogue and dialectic was here identified with an aspect that was
already thought to be independent of the body.

In Plato’s work this thinking, reasoning soul was stripped of its
sensuous quality entirely and given a thoroughly non-sensory, immortal
existence corresponding to the eternal nature of an utterly
transcendent and incorporeal realm homologous, perhaps, to that of the
Pythagoreans. For Plato, however, this realm “beyond the heavens” (Phaedrus
247) was the place not only of number but of all true ideas or
thought-patterns. Socrates, in his dialectic, has sought to stir a
reflection upon the essence, the unchanging truth of various
word-concepts like ‘justice’, ‘piety’, ‘courage’ — that is, he induced
a reflection upon these spoken words as concepts, existing in
themselves, and independent of their use in particular instances. Plato
glimpsed that these word-essences of the Socratic dialectic were
somehow akin to the objects of mathematical knowledge previously
immortalised by Pythagoras; henceforth all such essences of
thought-objects were installed within that fixed domain outside the
changing world of the senses.

“It is there that true being dwells, without colour or shape,
that cannot be touched; reason alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it,
and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof.” (Phaedrus 247 C)

The thinking, reasoning soul is that immortal part of man
that alone can attain to this pure domain and experience it directly;
indeed, being immortal and incorporeal itself the soul is most at home
in that world, is of the same nature, and it is only through a process
of forgetting that the soul falls from that divine world and becomes
embodied in this temporal, earthly form. Any genuine learning that we
may experience is nothing but the gradual recollection, by the embodied
or forgetful soul, of the pure, bodiless forms of that world it once
knew. The allegory in the Phaedrus thus recounts the manner in
which a human soul may be stirred by the sensual experience of beauty
from its complete immersion in this world of matter and change, and may
thus begin to remember, and be drawn toward, that more perfect,
fleshless beauty that is its rightful destination: the eternal world of
the ideas.

We have provided this very brief outline both to show what we presently
take to be the relation between the thought of Socrates and that of
Plato, and to illustrate the dependence of Plato’s metaphysics upon
alphabetic literacy. Here is our position: that the eternal and fixed
forms to which Plato’s metaphysics refer are inextricably tied to
visible and fixed shapes of the alphabet, and to the written words
formed by combining those shapes. The immortal soul or intellect
(termed ‘NOUS’ by the later Plato and by Aristotle) is, we believe, the
counterpart, within the individual awareness, of the external numbers
and letters upon which the individual was learning to focus his
attention.

Anyone who learned to focus his eyes upon the separate letters over and
over again, associating each shape with a specific sound with such
concentration and perseverance that the images finally began to speak,
spontaneously, from within his own mouth, gained access to a strange
new region of experience, acquired a new kind of verbal awareness that
felt peculiarly independent of his body and his body’s situation. This
new experience of soul, this reflective self, this “mind” which even
today seems so independent of the body and its lumbering vicissitudes,
is precisely this new synaesthesia, the new juxtaposition and overlap
of the senses brought by learning to read, or to write, with the
alphabet.

The written words, made by arranging several letters in the correct
sequence, now seemed to speak as soon as they were looked at (try
looking at a written word without seeing what “it says”). These
scratched, scrawled, or printed images did indeed exist independent of
the body and its particular spatial and temporal constraints, and,
although not outside of time and space altogether, they established and
inhabited a mode of temporality and spatiality far less subject to the
flux of change than any mode previously known to the body. Relative to
any individual’s life the letters of the alphabet had — indeed still
have — a virtually timeless and placeless quality. They could seem, to
culture previously steeped in the fluidity of an oral universe, to be
utterly unchanging forms, a most profound magic, as fixed and eternal
in their significance as the stars.

To be sure, there were many writing systems employed by the human
species prior to the alphabet, many of them remarkably intricate and
precise, and some of these are still in use today. However, none of
these systems — whether pictographic or “ideographic”, whether
syllabaries or rhebuses — accomplished what the alphabet did,
establishing a precise representation, not of the things referred to
but of the actual sound gestures made by the human mouth when speaking,
and utilising such a small quantity of symbols that virtually anyone
could quickly learn the entire set.

The alphabet was apparently developed by a Semitic people around 1500
BC, and, remarkably, it was only invented once. Every alphabet in the
world is derived, in some manner, from that original Semitic innovation
(Ong) which is thus that which I am employing to write this paper. The
Hebrew and other Semitic alphabets did not have letters for vowel
sounds; these sounds were originally supplied by the reader according
to context. (Still today the Semitic alphabets do not have separate
letters for these sounds, although late in the history of the Hebrew
aleph~bait “vowel points” — little dots and dashes written above or
below the letters — began to be utilised in certain texts to indicate
the appropriate vowel sounds.) The Greeks were the first to establish
specific letters for the vowels themselves, rendering the literal
representation of oral speech even more complete. Havelock (see Preface
to Plato) believes that it was this innovation that gave ancient
Greek culture its intellectual ascendancy, and indeed launched the
particular enterprise of abstraction and methodical reflection we now
call Western philosophy.

In fact much of what I have so far proposed in this paper regarding the
intertwining of Plato’s project with alphabetic literacy has been
admirably demonstrated by Havelock, Ong, and others. Further, Havelock
has perhaps shown that Plato’s epistemology and metaphysics were not
only dependent upon the advent of alphabetic literacy in Greece but
were necessitated by it! According to Havelock, Plato’s teachings and
writings established certain new ways of speaking which were absolutely
necessary if the new technology was to continue to spread.

The full transition from non-literacy to literacy in ancient Greece was
made possible only by this establishment of a way of speaking and of
thinking that was virtually free of the earlier linguistic conventions
and habits necessary for remembering and communicating within oral
culture. In Havelock’s view the agency which “summoned into being these
new powers of language and thought” and thus effected the full
transition to literacy was the serendipitous “partnership” between the
literate Plato and his teacher Socrates who, although an oralist,
utilised modes of thought and reflection made possible by the new
technology to interrogate and disrupt oral patterns of discourse. From
this perspective, Plato’s derogation of poetry, and his exclusion of
poets from the ideal republic of his vision, are perhaps best
understood as a rejection of traditional oral, or non-literate, modes
of awareness in favour of the new thinking informed by alphabetic
technology, despite the fact that Plato himself seems unaware of this
motive.

Author: David Abram
lives in California. He is the author of a bestselling book Return To The Senses.

Source: This
article
was sent to us by David Abram.

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